


As Long as I Gaze

by Waid



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: 'Nile buys too much milk' is the height of the drama here, 100 years is incredibly generous actually, Angst, Angst without plot, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, How will they USE the milk the thrilling suspense, Hurt/Comfort, Joe and Nile take a walk through London because God the author misses doing that, Joe is angry because he fucking should be, Little a Booker Discourse, M/M, Nicky is Something Else, Nile settling in, References to Medical Torture, Yet another aftermath fic, You'll know it when you see it, as a treat, but hey there's talking and crying if you like that sort of thing, different but complementary and extremely valid responses to betrayal, seriously, slice of immortal life, which you do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:00:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29164593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waid/pseuds/Waid
Summary: “It happened to you too,” Nile says softly. “I can see how worried you are about him, but he’s not the only one who got hurt. Immortal or not, no one just walks off being tortured.”“It wasn’t torture,” Joe says blandly.After Merrick, Nicky needs to be alone for a little while, and Joe needs not to be.Fortunately, Nile could use some company too.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 64
Kudos: 332





	1. Chapter 1

“I should have seen it,” Nicky murmurs.

Joe lifts himself on an elbow. “Can’t you sleep?”

He’s a little unnerved. Usually he knows, without needing to look at him, without even thinking about it, if Nicky is asleep or awake.

It isn’t late. There’s still light in the grey London sky. But after the shower, once Joe had finished washing the blood and worse out of Nicky’s hair, after the hasty takeaway meal which Joe ate without tasting anything, Nicky collapsed onto the bed, dragging Joe with him, and since then he hasn’t moved an inch.

The flat is quiet. Not even a clock to tick. Nile went with Copley and Andy to the hospital, and Booker …

 _I can’t sleep under the same roof as that man,_ Joe had said, before.

In a hotel, then. Or perhaps at Copley’s. Under a bridge for all Joe cares.

(Joe pictures that: Booker huddled against damp brick down by the Thames, fingers curled around a bottle. He flinches away from the image in what he tells himself is disgust.)

He can’t sleep anyway.

Booker’s pathetic hangdog face. Booker’s useless, showy self-hatred. Booker sitting companionably at his side in front of the TV and waiting for the grenades to blast in. The lower and upper limits on the length of time he must have planned it, and on the number of lies he must have told. The exact angle at which the bullet entered Andy’s back.

Of course, he doesn’t think only about Booker, he thinks about Merrick and Kozak, and Nicky smiling at him across the lab, and Nicky screaming under the scalpels, and Nicky dead on the floor. He thinks about what happened (hands on his skin, pincers in his neck, Nicky screaming, Nicky screaming, Nicky screaming) and what didn’t (tearing Booker to pieces, Nicky staying dead.) He tries to stop, to let the rhythm of Nicky’s slow, orderly breathing soothe his own, but he can’t. His heart strikes and clenches like a fist; he can barely manage to lie still against Nicky’s back. Not that he exactly wants to move. Joe is beyond exhausted; he remembers only delirious snatches of sleep towards the end of the second day, along with the handful of times they drugged him unconscious. The mattress is soft beneath him and Nicky is finally safe in his arms. But there’s no welcoming dark behind his eyes. His body feels like a faulty neon tube, buzzing and spitting with raw, ugly light.

At least he had them — the drugs, the few rags of sleep. If they ever sedated Nicky after they jabbed those first needles into their necks, Joe didn’t see it.

Beside him, Nicky lies staring at the wall, his eyes fixed and empty as when …

Joe swallows, and asks, “What should you have seen?”

“How unhappy he was. He was always hinting at it — all those jokes that weren’t jokes. All that alcohol. And I didn’t do anything. I thought … I don’t know, I thought it was a good sign that he was looking for jobs, I even thought that maybe finding Nile … but I shouldn’t have guessed; I should have talked to him. Because he must have been … in agony, to do this.”

“Stop,” Joe begs. “Please, stop.”

Every word makes his pulse hammer in his chest and his temples — a physical pain that rattles along his nerves and doesn’t fade after a few seconds but stays, stays, stays. He feels a little crazy. Is he the only one who’s angry? Did they all witness different versions of the same events? What universe is this, where the question is what _Nicky_ did wrong?

No one argued when he said he didn’t want Booker in the flat, but if he hadn’t said it, would the others have brought him here? Pretended nothing had happened? Why did it have to be him?

Nicky falls silent.

Oh, but how can he blame the others for not saying anything? Nile’s too new, too young to understand. Andy was still bleeding. And Nicky — Nicky looks almost too exhausted to breathe.

 _My love,_ Joe thinks again, _were you awake for all of it?_

Slowly as if he still felt every bruise, every year, Nicky turns onto his back and studies him. He raises a hand to caress Joe’s cheek.

“We’re safe,” he reminds him softly. “It’s over.”

“Yes.”

It’s not.

Nicky smiles up at him. It’s not a natural smile, and nor is it false, any more than a bar of music is false for not being birdsong. It’s beautiful, and made just for Joe. He turns his hand to stroke Joe’s face with the back of his fingers. “Make love to me.”

In theory, it’s exactly what Joe needs. Usually, it’s what they do, after a mission, after a death. He needs to kiss Nicky everywhere, pour love into all the places he was hurt, wrap himself in the living warmth of his body, and transform a little of this blaze within him into light.

But Nicky is still too pale. His fingertips on Joe’s cheek are oddly cold. There’s something still stricken and unfocused in his eyes. It can’t be blood loss or a concussion. Is it only that he’s been too unnaturally still for too long, his blood cooling while the memories continue what Kozak, and Merrick, and _Booker_ began?

“That’s not what you want,” says Joe.

“I want these thoughts out of your head,” Nicky whispers. His fingers slide upwards to Joe’s temple. “They’re so loud.”

Joe shakes his head and Nicky’s hand drops away. “Don’t make a gift of yourself. Not today.”

“Hayati,” Nicky murmurs. “Don’t I have the right?”

Of course, over nine hundred years, there have been times that they’ve made love without a perfect symmetry of passion, when sex has been an act of comfort or indulgence or praise from one to the other. But now the idea makes Joe shiver. “Today, no,” he says. “Today no one is going to _take_ anything more from you. I will not be one more person to make use of you.”

Abruptly, Nicky’s eyes overflow with tears.

“Oh,” Joe feels a sob, a scream, clawing its way up his own throat. “…love…”

Nicky wraps an arm over his eyes before Joe can wipe the tears away. “Joe,” he says from behind it, “you could never, it could never be like that.”

Joe waits, fighting the temptation to pull Nicky’s arm away from his eyes. They don’t usually hide from each other.

“Talk to me,” he whispers, when he can’t stand it any more.

Nicky lowers his arm in order to squeeze Joe’s hand. He gives him another lovely smile which he clearly can’t afford, and says, very softly, “No.”

It hurts, and for a moment Joe wants to protest. Then he remembers that Nicky was talking barely a minute ago, and Joe told him to stop.

And he can’t take it back. Yes, he sees Nicky’s compassion for the man who betrayed them and part of him loves him all the more for it, but that is excruciating too; it makes him wants to fly to Booker and scream at him, _You see? You see who you did this to?_ He _cannot_ listen to Nicky blaming himself. Oh, of course he does, Joe thinks bitterly, and then again, with helpless love and protective rage, _of course he does._ It’s one more wound, another region of damage.

It isn’t over at all. It goes on and Joe still can’t stop it.

“Anyway, you already know,” Nicky adds wearily.

But Joe doesn’t know everything. There were those hours when they drugged him, when he doesn’t know what happened to either one of them.

“Then what can I do, what do you want?”

“I …”

And it’s like being catapulted back nine hundred years, when he’d demanded an answer to the same question because Nicolò came to his bed and then retreated into absences and silences and refused to say if caresses exchanged at night meant anything in the day. Yusuf had been angry then, he’d thought Nicolò was playing with him; it was only when he heard that low, tremulous note in his voice, the way his body stiffened as if it hurt physically to force the words out, that he understood how difficult it was for Nicolò to say what he _wanted_ , how hard he had to fight to do it.

 _I want you_ , he’d said finally. _Don’t you know that? How can you not know? I want you, I want to be with you._

But nine centuries are a long time. There’s almost nothing Nicky could hesitate to say to him now. Almost nothing except this.

“Nothing — I want … quiet, I just want to lie here for a while and you … you want to hit something, or scream, don’t you? And I can’t … I’m sorry — I want — I think I want to be alone.”

Joe nods. He gets up in silence from the bed. Nicky seizes his hand again, and says, _“I’m sorry._ ”

He seems so desperate for understanding. As if, after centuries, he might not get it.

Joe crouches beside the bed, and presses his forehead against Nicky’s. He’s still so _cold_. “It's all right. I understand.”

It’s true that he understands. All those hours pinned down under the pitiless lights, helplessly exposed not only to the needles and blades and the scientists’ indifferent gaze, but also to each other, terrified of being separated and aware how much every cut and puncture and every cry they couldn’t choke back hurt the other. A little time to suffer _unobserved._ It’s not much to ask. He understands, even if it’s not what he wants, even if it’s never happened before.

They can be alone, obviously. They can be apart. There are missions that require it. Every now and then they take normal, separate jobs — they’ve been scribes, fishermen, teachers, nurses, they’ve worked on building sites. And sometimes it’s pleasant to wander alone through an art gallery, a market, a stretch of woodland, if only for the sake of describing it to the other afterwards. Nicky likes to attend lectures almost without regard to what they’re about, while Joe needs to know in advance that he’s interested if he’s going to sit in silence for that long. There’s football, which bores Nicky to death but which Joe loves —

(Oh. No more football for a while.)

But Joe can’t remember a time that Nicky’s wanted to be alone after being _hurt_. Which means this is worse even than 1941, and Moscow, when …

Well, he already knew it was worse.

He’s not so stupid nor so immature as not to understand this isn’t a rejection in any sense that counts, but it feels awful to leave Nicky alone like this, all the same.

He slips on a pair of jeans and leaves the room.

* * *

Nile enters as he’s closing the door to the bedroom. Looking past him, she must see Nicky’s curled back as he rolls back onto his side.

“Is he okay?” she asks in a whisper.

“No,” Joe answers, blankly.

She winces at herself. “Stupid question.”

There’s a thermostat on the wall of the little passageway that leads to the living room. It’s May, but Joe thinks for a moment, and then turns on the heating. For some unfathomable reason the act makes him think of Quynh, which in turn prompts a surge of grief for Andy, who is dying, dying even if it could take decades, but — given who she is, probably won’t.

Then he realises Nile is alone.

A horrible wave of adrenaline floods him. “Where’s Andy?”

“Oh — no, Joe. She’s OK. She will be OK, I mean. They wanted to keep her in overnight.”

Joe tries to get his breath back, tries not to have a breakdown right there by the thermostat. He wasn’t thinking, he realises. This isn’t how Nile would be acting if Andy had died.

“And … she let them?”

“Well, she didn’t _want_ to.”

“So, how …?”

“So I told her she was being an idiot and she had to.”

“And that _worked_?”

Joe is seriously impressed, even more than he was when Nile rescued them all from the lab. He knows how to raid a building. He has no idea how to make Andy do something she doesn’t want to do, particularly not when it’s “lie down.”

Nile shrugs as if she hasn’t just testified to a greater miracle than immortality, and heads towards the living room.

Joe follows. The furnishings are a little dated, he realises, now that he sees them through Nile’s eyes. The wallpaper had seemed rather elegant in 1998, and perfectly fine even in 2011 when he was last here, but the damask print looks fussy to him now, and it’s peeling away from the wall in places. The swagged pelmet above the curtains is inexcusable, good for nothing but gathering dust. The air smells faintly stale.

Nile picks up the TV remote, then glances at the closed door to the bedroom where Nicky lies. She puts it back down, and Joe is grateful not to have to say anything.

It’s awkward. He owes her so much, and knows her so little. And he is so very tired, and he doesn’t know, now, what there is left to welcome her to. 

But he’ll try, at least.

“How are you, Nile?”

Nile has to think about it for rather too long, and makes a face. “Well. I guess the fact that I have no idea how to answer that question isn’t a great sign, but also, I think I had the best day out of all of us, so there’s that.”

It warms him a little that she says _all of us_ so naturally.

“Tomorrow will be better.” It has to be, surely. “Nice dress,” he adds, before she can ask how he is in return.

Nile, incongruously with his last memory of her, is wearing a navy dress with white polka dots. It’s a little too tight at the shoulders and loose at the waist, but it suits her. Her braids, still a little dishevelled but rinsed clean of blood, fall girlishly over her shoulders. For an immortal soldier who just demolished a private army before diving out of a building with a sadistic pharmaceutical CEO in her arms, she looks oddly demure.

“Oh, yeah. Thanks.” A little self-consciously, Nile plucks at the skirt of the dress. Complicated expressions flash across her face. “It was Copley’s wife’s. He said he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of any of her clothes before, but I needed it, so …”

“There are excellent tailors in Deptford,” says Joe, imagining how the dress could look with a few alterations, so as not to think of what Copley is trying to atone for, who his accomplice was. “But you will need things you’ve chosen yourself. We should go shopping.”

“…Shopping in _London,_ ” Nile echoes. He has scarcely seen her smile. It feels good to make her do it now — to see her permit herself a small, wary pleasure in the strange turn her life has taken. “You mean like … Oxford Street?”

“Absolutely not,” says Joe, horrified.

“Ah. Tourist hellscape? I get it. But I gotta see it anyway. You can show me the nice places after.” 

They examine the bookcase together. It’s less than half full — none of them have ever spent more than a couple of months at a time here, and that not often.

Nile picks a book about Toulouse Lautrec and leafs through it.

“Are you hungry?” Joe asks.

“I got a sandwich at the hospital. It was gross, but I’m good. And it’s like eleven at night, Afghan time.”

“You must be exhausted.”

“Yeah, but I won’t sleep if I go to bed now.”

She settles on the sofa with her book. Joe gazes at the shelves a little longer; the colours and words swim before his eyes and it takes a while for them to settle into meaning. Behind him, Nile puts in her earbuds. The buzz bothers him, it scratches at his nerves, but the least she deserves is her music and his patience.

His eyes snag on a handsome 1890s edition of _La Celestina_ on the bottom shelf. He recognises it, having bought it, though not for himself.

There’s a leather bookmark, still protruding between the pages.

When he can breathe again, Joe takes the book from its place, transfers it to the kitchen bin and then returns. He feels Nile’s eyes on him as he does it, but she doesn’t comment.

He finds a book about the Russian Revolution of 1917, which Nicky bought twenty years ago in the hope that a historian could render it less confusing than living it had been, but then neither of them ever got round to reading it. He joins Nile on the sofa and opens it, and immediately discovers that reminding himself of _Moscow,_ at any point in its history, was an incredibly stupid idea, because _Moscow_ reminds him of _today._

He sees arms dragged taut, he sees beautiful eyes left empty. He barely manages not to run back into the bedroom to make certain that Nicky’s really there, that he’s really breathing and all this isn’t some desperate hallucination and Joe isn’t still kneeling over him in a pool of blood on that floor. It seems possible enough, because none of this feels real. It doesn’t feel real that Booker could have done this to anyone. To anyone.

He leans back against the sofa and tries again to slow his breathing, and when he fails, remembering what he’s learned of meditation over the years, to observe its frantic rhythm, to wait the agitation out. But he’s too exhausted to concentrate; he keeps forgetting to even try to call his thoughts back as they fly away to Nicky. To Booker.

 _Hit something, or scream,_ Nicky had said. But it is antisocial to scream in the middle of Zone 2 and there is nothing to hit. Perhaps he should find something. Someone. At this point, why _not_ give serious consideration to the idea of finding Booker and beating him to death a few times? It wouldn’t take and it might make Joe feel better.

 _He would let you,_ says a voice in his mind that sounds like Nicky’s.

The charm of that idea evaporates instantly.

But the anger doesn’t, it grips and burns. He wants to crawl out of his skin to leave it behind. If he had something to do, a job —

But he isn’t so far gone as not to realise that he can’t trust himself in any kind of fight in this state, even in the unlikely event that he could stumble out into Bermondsey and find a problem suited to their particular skills on the doorstep.

There’s nothing he can do with this feeling, then.

A tapping sound jolts him out of his thoughts. Beside him, Nile isn’t reading either. Her eyes are closed, and her fingers are drumming a tense, rapid rhythm against the glossy cover of her book.

She must feel him looking. She opens her eyes and exhales, shakily. “I guess I’m still kind of wired,” she says, taking out one of the headphones.

“Wired.” It isn’t an unfamiliar expression, but it’s one that’s still relatively new to him; he wouldn’t have thought to use it himself. Joe tilts his head, taking a moment to appreciate it. “Yes, me too.”

She smiles ruefully at him and he finds himself smiling back.

“What are you listening to?”

Nile offers him an earbud, and he shifts closer to her. Her shoulder is warm against his.

He doesn’t hate the instrumentation, though to him the melody seems uncomfortably fragmented and the singer’s voice is distorted by that warped, digitised effect that’s everywhere these days. Still, it’s certainly much better now that he can hear more of it than a rhythmic hiss.

“Well?” she asks as the song ends. Joe pulls his mouth sceptically to one side, and she sniffs indignantly, snatching the earbud back. “I guess it’s a little ahead of the curve for you.”

“I have an extensive collection of modern music,” Joe informs her.

She looks at him with the ruthlessness of the young. “Twenty says every song’s older than I am.”

Joe opens his mouth to cite Zahouania, Franco Battiato, and Nirvana, and then does some mental arithmetic. He shuts his mouth.

“Ha!”

“In fairness,” he appeals, “almost everything is older than you are.“ Nile laughs and it’s definitely the first time he’s witnessed that. “I would open my wallet,” he adds, “but I suppose it’s in France.”

He regrets it as her smile fades. “You’re off the hook. It was the principle.”

“Oh no. A bet’s a bet.” He wishes Nicky had been here for it. “I pay my debts. Try me with another.”

She gives him both headphones this time. This song is gentler, sadder — no drums and hazy, shimmery guitars that remind him of the sixties.

“ _The start of nothing_  
_I could hate you now_  
_It's quite all right to hate me now…”_

Almost, he pulls out the headphones. But then he doesn’t, lets the music pour over him, the pain in it smarting and soothing at once like ice water on a burn. It makes his eyes sting and he closes them until the song ends.

“Better,” he concedes softly.

“Then there’s hope for you,” Nile says. Then she gives her knees a decisive clap and stands up. “OK. I’m gonna take a walk.”

It’s only then that Joe realises that it’s not just that he hates being away from Nicky: he doesn’t want to be alone at all.

Nile says, “You wanna come?”

* * *

Nile sets a brisk pace, marching with a determined air as if she had some important goal in mind, and Joe is content to follow her without caring about their route. His body protests at the speed, his muscles begging for the rest they refused during the hours he lay against Nicky’s back. But the effort of keeping up with Nile gives a purpose to the adrenaline that burns like acid in his veins, smooths the jagged edges of the rhythm of his heart.

 _I’ll be fine,_ Nicky had said. _Go with Nile, make sure she’s OK._

A gust of wind casts a scattering of rain onto his face. He glances ahead at Nile, but it doesn’t seem to bother her, she doesn’t suggest turning back. He tries to focus on the little points of water on his face, the breeze stirring his curls. He runs his hand over a wet metal railing, through the stiff, cool leaves of a laurel hedge, along a rough brick wall. He can move. There’s nothing holding him down, nothing between him and the sky.

They’re crossing a little park when Nile stops in her tracks, wheels round and cries, “Wait, where are we going?”

Joe catches up to her. A stitch twinges in his side. “Nowhere in particular, I thought.”

“Yeah, yeah …” Nile looks around unsteadily at an array of rose beds, a children’s playground: “But where are we?”

“…London,” Joe responds cautiously.

She rolls her eyes. “Dude, I know. I’m not _dissociating,_ I’m just …” her lip trembles, “…lost.”

Slowly enough that she can move away if she wants, he takes hold of her arm. He waits until she looks him in the eyes. “You’re not lost. You’re here with me.” Nile grasps a handful of the sleeve of his jacket as if it’s all that’s keeping her from sliding off a cliff. “This is Southwark. There’s the Shard. We’re five minutes’ walk from the Thames.”

She stares at him, breathing hard.

“You’re not lost,” he whispers again. “I won’t let you get lost.”

Nile nods shakily, and it’s only now that it’s working that Joe notices he’s slowed his breathing for her to imitate. He couldn’t do it for himself, or even for Nicky. But now, somehow, he finds the calm she needs easily.

They hold each other’s arms and breathe.

“And … you know the way back?”

“Yes. We came down Long Lane, and then Weston Street …”

She sighs, closing her eyes, and he feels her relax. “OK. Thank God you’re here, because I don’t even remember what the building looks like.”

“Do you want to go back now?”

Nile hesitates. “No. Not yet. If you’re not too tired?”

Joe shakes his head.

“Then can you show me some of London?” She smiles crookedly. “Not Oxford Street.”

He smiles back. “Of course. But no more power walking, okay? I’m old.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been stuck on "80% written" for, oh, six months? When I started Booker Discourse was quite the fresh new thing! But ah well, here we are, and now I HAVE finished it, and I'm just tidying up the second half and will post in a few days.
> 
> Both songs Joe listens to on Nile's phone are by Frank Ocean - the second, the one that gets to him, is "Ivy".
> 
> Title is from "Waterloo Sunset" by The Kinks.


	2. Chapter 2

There doesn’t seem any particular reason to let go of each other, so they go arm in arm. He leads her down the Victorians’ dark tunnel of brick arches under the railway, across Tooley Street, through a smart little piazza of shops and restaurants under a vaulted glass roof. Nile is charmed, as he hoped she would be, by the large, eccentric bronze fountain in the centre: a ship with a jutting human nose, moving oars and water spraying from trumpet spouts. He remembers the prison that used to stand here.

Outside the Thames is at high tide, and she can see Tower Bridge. She smiles, and takes a photo. Joe puts a hand up to the horizon and estimates they have half an hour of daylight left.

They walk on, along Bankside. Nile rubs the centre of her chest where she was shot.

“Is it just in my head or after you heal is there this … feeling …?”

“Like a tingling?”

“Yes! Well … no? It’s not tingling and it’s not cold and it’s not an ache but …”

“And when you focus on it, you’re not sure it’s there at all?”

“But when I don’t focus, it really bothers me … Which doesn’t even make sense.”

“Quynh claimed she never had it. She said we were all hypochondriacs and that we were imagining it.”

“We can’t all be imagining it!” She frowns down at her body. “… Shit, unless I am.”

“It lasts a few hours.” His fingers wander to a place at the base of his ribs. He’s not even sure what happened there. “Or a few days, if it’s been a lot.”

His flesh rings with echoes. He wants them to go away and he wants them to stay. At least they’re an admission that something happened, despite the denial of his intact skin. He shouldn’t think like this, he shouldn’t; so many people would give anything to be free of pain so easily. And he owes so much to their gift.

But his whole body feels like a lie.

He leads her westwards. The hideous bulbous skyscraper on the north bank of the Thames is new. But so are all these funny little light sculptures everywhere. He still thinks of the huge modern art gallery in what used to be Bankside Power Station as new, even though it’s been decades, now. On the steps outside it, a pair of young women are entwined, kissing passionately, lost in each other as the tourists stream past and that’s – not new, not exactly, but it’s not old enough that he can help noticing with a little pang of anxious, hopeful joy.

“No one’s looking at us,” Nile says, marvelling. He gives her an inquiring glance. “In Afghanistan I couldn’t exactly walk into town and blend in. I mean, I didn’t like it, but I got kind of used to it.”

“I have views on the American presence in Afghanistan,” Joe remarks.

“Ah.” Nile nods slowly.

“And elsewhere.”

“That’s fair.” He feels her tense as she considers it, with obvious, mounting concern. “Listen –”

“I have been known to be surprisingly forgiving towards young Christian soldiers trespassing in lands that don’t belong to them.”

He wants her to start thinking about it. But the conversations they’ll have about it can wait for now.

Nile smiles again, still a little uncertain. “You don’t need to kill me a bunch of times first?”

“After today I’d say you can skip that part. What were you going to say?”

“I was thinking, here we could be anyone. And it’s good but it’s weird, you know? It feels like everyone should be able to see that we’re … different. And everything that’s happened.”

“It gets easier,” is all he can tell her, although the old way of being at home in the world never really comes back. “But I remember the feeling. In the first years I was terrified I would have some sort of ridiculous accident in public and some large crowd of people would react very badly.”

“Did it ever happen?”

“No. Well. Ridiculous accidents, yes. Healing in front of people and having to play dead and hope they didn’t notice, yes. But only on missions. I have never yet been squashed in the street by a falling piano.”

“There’s a Never Have I Ever game,” says Nile. “So … most ridiculous death?”

“Hmm. I may have once reversed a very nice sports car off a cliff. With all of us in it.”

“Ouch.”

“In my defence, I hadn’t slept for two days, but Andy still won’t let me drive her anywhere. Oh, and I was struck by lightning outside Mecca in 1453 while Nicky and I were exchanging theories on the nature of God.” He points at her laughing face, vindicated. “There! Nicky still doesn’t agree it was funny.”

“Well, do you think any of his were funny?”

“Is it fair to ask me to be logical after the day I’ve had?” He exhales. “No,” he admits softly, “none of his were funny.”

The pale grey clouds begin to fill with colour: gold, purple, red. The river blazes under the bridge. Nile leans on the barrier of the South Bank and breathes, “Oh.”

“As requested,” he says. “Some of London.”

Andy had a stash of emergency phones in the boot of the car. Joe takes a photo of Nile and the sunset and sends it to Nicky’s. Andy wouldn’t approve but Andy isn’t here. And the worst has already happened, and phones had nothing to do with it.

“That brick has a camera on it?”

“Just barely.” It isn’t much of a picture, just a tiny scrap of the beauty before them, but he’d rather give Nicky that than nothing. “Can I borrow yours?”

“At least somebody asks me,” Nile grumbles, handing it over.

It isn’t the camera he wants. He finds a song. “Is this too old for you?”

“‘Waterloo Sunset’? I’m young, not ignorant. Oh!” She turns back to the sunset, the river, the bridge. “That’s where we are?”

They share the headphones again.

It’s sadder, lonelier than he remembers – _but I don’t need a friend –_ but still –

Ribbons of violet and gold spread over Westminster.

_But I don’t … feel afraid …_   
_As long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset_   
_I am in Paradise._

Nile sighs as the song ends. “Yeah, okay,” she says softly. “Man had a point.”

“There are things you lose,” Joe tells her, “and I don’t mean the big things. Some things just become tedious. I used to love fireworks, now they bore me. I never need to hear another piece of harp music. I think the world should be banned from using chocolate for, oh, let’s say a couple of centuries –”

“ _Sorry, what?”_

“They put it in everything,” Joe complains.

“What – that’s not even a little true – can’t you just not eat it?”

“I can still smell it. Now, admittedly, it isn’t always permanent – Nicky hated lilies for a hundred years, but he got over it –”

Nile puts her head between her hands and moans. “Lilies – why – no, give me a second, I’m not over the chocolate thing and it could be what breaks me – how can you _smell_ other people’s chocolate? I mean – Jesus you really are old – _what?”_

“You’re getting distracted. My point is – you don’t get bored of that.” He indicates the sunset.

They watch it in silence for a while as the colours deepen: threads of blue and silver among the amber and the rose.

“How are you really, Nile?” he asks her.

Nile lets out a long breath and shivers a little. The pretty blue and white dress is thin for evening. “I killed a lot of people today,” she says at last. “And I’ve been wondering – does everyone know? Their families, I mean. But it’s been what – five hours? So no, there’s got to be people that don’t know they’ve lost someone yet. And those men … did they all know, _really_ know, what they were part of? If you were Merrick, you wouldn’t tell all your secrets to the guys on the door, right? And maybe they were still guilty of something, maybe they all deserved _something,_ but was it death? I don’t know. I don’t know and I killed them anyway. And I know I couldn’t like … put them on trial, or anything. What was happening to you needed to end, right then, and I didn’t have another way. But I don’t even remember how many there were. I don’t know what that means but I don’t think I like it. Just one day, and I’ve already lost count.”

Joe doesn’t answer at once.

He’s been thinking about the mercenaries in South Sudan, of whom all he can now say he knows for sure is that they were not trafficking kidnapped girls.

“I wish you didn’t have to suffer this. I wish you had never been faced with such a choice. But I believe these doubts are precious and I wouldn’t take them from you if I could. And I can’t. I can only thank you for choosing to save us even at the cost of accepting them. Nile, thank you for my freedom.”

She smiles again, sad but sincere. “You’re welcome.”

The last golden rind of the sun disappears. Joe checks his phone.

“He better not have left you on read,” says Nile.

“No.”

Nicky hasn’t seen the message, although Joe is sure his phone was on the bedside table. Joe hopes he’s finally asleep, hopes he hasn’t just pointlessly woken him. But when he pictures Nicky he sees him still curled on his side, staring at nothing, sunk too deep wherever he’s gone in his head to hear the chime.

Or worse, much worse: the door smashed in, the phone cracked on the ground, the apartment empty –

His breath catches on nothing. He should never have left him alone. Nicky wouldn’t even have wanted solitude if Joe could just have given him _quiet_.

“It happened to you too,” Nile says softly. “I can see how worried you are about him, but he’s not the only one who got hurt. Immortal or not, no one just walks off being tortured.”

“It wasn’t torture,” Joe says blandly. 

“Come on, man. Don’t do that. I saw –”

“I have been tortured before. I’m sorry – I don’t want to terrify you. You mustn’t think any of this is normal for us. We’re more difficult to capture when our _friends_ don’t _sell_ us –” He stops himself, swallowing. He doesn’t want to talk to her about Booker. “But it has happened.”

He remembers how devastated Nicolò was – every time, of course, but especially the first, in Granada, when he stood over the bodies of de Cisneros’s men and saw the instruments they’d been using on him. How he’d cried while he washed the blood off him and kissed his regrown fingernails and once burst out, “I wish it had been me,” and Yusuf rested against his chest and thought no, no, anything but that.

It wasn’t a prayer he’d had granted, or a promise he could keep. He doesn’t tell Nile about Salzburg, or Constantinople, or Moscow, and the terrible eighteen hours before they found Nicky in the Sukhanovka in 1941, which he can no longer count among the worst of his life.

Booker is in that memory too. He was there while Joe cut the restraints that held Nicky suspended by his wrists from the ceiling of that tiny, ice-cold cell; he shared the weight when Nicky fell forward, conscious but still horribly silent. Joe had even _left_ Nicky, slumped in Booker’s arms in a stairwell so that he and Andy could clear the floor above while Nicky healed enough to walk. There have been only three people in almost a millennium he’s trusted so much.

He watches the ripples darkening on the Thames.

“But when someone tortures you, whether for information, or a confession, or even just for the pleasure of hurting you – at least they have to _see_ you. It must _matter_ to them that you have a mind as well as a body. That you can feel as well as bleed.”

He leans more of his weight onto the embankment wall. He spins one of Nile’s earbuds between his fingers.

“But they … they cut into us and held the wounds open and put their hands inside our bodies and ripped out pieces of us and they did this to him, to _him,_ in front of me, and not so that his suffering should force me to give them what they wanted, for they already had it, but because they did not care, and they observed every spasm and twitch of pain and they talked to each other as if we could not hear them. It wasn’t torture, it was _strip mining_ and I have _never_ –” suddenly, the air runs out. He gasps for a breath that isn’t enough. Nor is the next. “That has never happened to me before.”

Nile silently puts a hand over his and leaves it there.

Perversely, Joe finds himself struggling against the steadiness he feels spreading from that small, warm point of contact. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“Why?”

Joe passes the back of his free hand across his eyes. “You’re so young.” Nile, with her new glossy skin, onto which too much blood has already been splashed. Nile, who should have been protected, and who had to protect them.

“I’m old enough to hold your hand, Joe.”

Joe has no more strength to fight, today. He turns his hand over so he can clasp hers.

London glows around them. The river rolls quietly on. Hers is the only hand on him.

She murmurs, “I’m sorry for not getting to you sooner.”

“Oh, you were very timely. They were about to start extracting whole organs.”

“ _Fuck,_ ” Nile bows forward as if she’s about to throw up. But she doesn’t let go of his hand.

Joe breathes, the rhythm gradually slowing. He feels the wave start to recede.

“But you saved us. Thank you.”

“You’ve thanked me already. You’d do it for me.” She pauses. “You’ll do it for me.”

“Yes,” Joe vows. “Always.”

His phone beeps.

Nicky has written: _Beautiful. Can you buy milk?_

* * *

Nicky comes to meet them in the hallway as they let themselves in. He doesn’t really look better, in fact it’s clear that he’s been crying. But he’s standing, and his fingers are warm when they tangle with Joe’s.

“We have milk!” says Nile proudly.

“… a _lot_ of milk,” Joe notes, as Nicky’s eyes widen slightly at the scale of Nile’s contribution.

Joe still hasn’t a penny on him and didn’t feel like going inside when they passed the corner shop. He hadn’t realised until too late that Nile seemed to be under the impression that if Nicky wanted milk, then the more milk he had, the happier he’d be. Joe didn’t even know such enormous bottles were to be had in England.

Nicky meets his eyes and Joe sees a faint glimmer of amusement there. He takes the bottle into the kitchen. It remains startlingly full even when he half-fills a large saucepan with it. The food cupboards are almost empty and he jettisons a couple of ancient jars of herbs without opening them, but there are some whole nutmeg seeds, and a bag of sugar. He finds some dried vanilla pods in a ceramic jar, sniffs them, looks mildly dubious but then evidently decides they’ll do.

“You’re both cold,” he says. “And we’re all tired.”

“Is this a thing?” Nile asks, as he grates the nutmeg into the milk. “Hot milk after missions?”

“No,” Joe replies. “This is new.”

“It could not have been a thing. We never had so much milk before,” says Nicky, so innocently that it’s a second before Nile says “Goddammit, I knew I bought too much.”

Joe joins in without mercy: “Ah, remember the old days, Nicky? With this much milk, we would have been kings.”

Nile starts laughing. Every time it happens Joe feels a fraction better. “Stop that.”

“I would have bought you a small castle, my love, at the very least – ”

“Listen,” says Nile, “where I come from, this is a normal amount of milk.”

Solemnly, Nicky hands her a cup. “You have blessed our household.” 

They drink it in front of the TV. Joe and Nile take the sofa, Nicky settles on the carpet, his back warm against Joe’s legs. Joe might consider the hot milk a little sickly most days but yes, tonight it’s soothing.

Nile falls asleep barely ten minutes into the game show, her head falling against Joe’s shoulder. Nicky carefully extracts her half-full cup from her hand, and smiles up at Joe. Bracketed in the warmth of both of them, Joe doesn’t last much longer.

_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is kind of a weird shape. This would be rather a nice ending, but Joe and Nicky still have so much to talk about! After staring at it for days I've decided what they have to say to each other really _doesn't_ belong in the same chapter as Nile and Joe's walk, but don't worry, I'm going to go right ahead and post it.


	3. Chapter 3

He wakes to find the room dark and quiet, and Nile gone. Nicky’s still on the floor, an arm thrown over Joe’s lap and his head on his knee. But he’s still awake. Joe knows.

He strokes Nicky’s hair, cupping his hand carefully over the back of his head.

“It was quick, I didn’t suffer,” Nicky murmurs, answering so many things that Joe hasn’t said out loud.

Wordlessly, Joe gets down from the sofa and joins him on the floor. They both start to shake as they reach for each other, and they kiss, hard and desperately, hands gripping each other so tight it hurts. Then they crouch there in silence, their foreheads pressed against each other, waiting for the tremors to fade.

“We laughed,” Nicky whispers. “We joked, and I was so glad that we could, that they hadn’t taken that from us.” He lifts Joe’s hands to his lips and kisses them both. “God, Joe, you were wonderful. I was so proud of you. But …”

“But it wasn’t actually all that funny.”

“Not that funny,” Nicky agrees. He lets go of Joe’s hands to slide his arms around him instead. “I’m sorry I sent you away.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

“While it was happening I couldn’t … go away in my head, because I didn’t want to leave you. But afterwards I still … had to.”

“I know. It’s all right. The walk was good for me, too.”

Nicky sighs, his breath warm against Joe’s neck. “I can talk about it, if you still want to.”

Joe nods, but says, “Not here.”

They go back to their room and change out of their clothes. They sit facing each other on the bed, Nicky settled cross-legged against the pillows.

Joe’s braced to hear whatever Nicky has to say about Booker but Nicky seems to be waiting for him to start, so he asks, “Did they ever anaesthetise you?”

“No, but it wasn’t how you’re thinking,” says Nicky rapidly, trying to outpace the sharp breath Joe takes after the first word. “You weren’t lucky. They weren’t – gentler with you.”

Joe doesn’t see how that can be true. “What happened, then?”

Nicky hesitates. He mutters, “I couldn’t see all of it.”

“Your eyes –” Joe blurts out, in unthinking panic.

Nicky smiles at him sadly, reaches for his hand again. “There were too many of them between us, sometimes.”

He looks down. Joe waits, watching Nicky steel himself against the memory.

“They were interested in bone regrowth,” Nicky begins. “They sawed out one of your ribs, and when it grew back they filmed it, timed it. They took samples of the marrow as it happened. Over and over. They wanted to see if it was always the same or if there were variations. Joe …” His voice cracks. “It started taking longer. As If they were just … wearing you out. They only stopped because they had to give you so much anaesthetic to keep you under that you went into respiratory failure, and they didn’t want to kill you, not then.”

“Oh.”

Joe touches the base of his ribs. At least now he knows. 

“I didn’t feel it,” he says, but Nicky shakes his head and his hands tighten around his.

“You did. At the end they just … _left_ you there and the drugs wore off before you’d finished healing. You felt that. I’m glad if you don’t remember.”

Dimly, Joe does remember: struggling to wake up, pain clawing at him, not knowing why. He remembers looking for Nicky without understanding why his limbs wouldn’t move, why his eyelids would barely lift. And Nicky’s voice murmuring from somewhere too far away, _it’s all right, love, go back to sleep, they’ve gone for now._

“They didn’t do that to you while you were awake?”

Every incision and extraction Joe was conscious for was more or less the same for them both; he hasn’t been able to get it out of his head that the occasional anaesthesia was the only, inexplicable difference, that whatever they did to him while he slept happened to Nicky in terrible, solitary wakefulness.

“No. No, I told you. They didn’t sedate you out of kindness; they just needed you _still._ ”

But all of this, Nicky must know because he overheard it, listening to them calmly discussing what they were doing and the sound of the saw as he lay there, helpless.

“Then what did they do to you?

“Nothing so invasive. With you they were more interested how this works.” Nicky gestures wearily at their bodies. “With me they were working on … on what Booker wanted, I suppose, even if I doubt it was for his benefit.”

Joe goes cold. “Killing you?”

Forever. At his side, while he slept.

“No! I’m sorry, love, I shouldn’t have said it that way. They didn’t want me dead, even if they could have done it – they thought they might be able to stop a wound healing, or slow it, at least. They had some formula. ” He takes Joe’s face in his hands. “It didn’t work. At all.”

“And how did they establish it didn’t work?” Joe barely recognises his own voice. He is not reassured; one wound is all it takes. “ _What did they do to you?_ ”

“Joe, I promise you know the worst. You saw it. You lived it.”

Joe stares at him. “Tell me.”

“Shallow cuts.” Nicky says. He lifts an unmarked arm. “Here. If they couldn’t even keep a scratch open, why do anything worse?”

“There’s something you’re not saying.” Nicky’s gaze slides away from him and Joe seizes his arm. “Please. Imagining it is worse. You know everything that happened to me.”

“She cut my vocal cords,” Nicky says suddenly, almost without tone.

The room seems to whirl around him.

“She …”

His voice fails, as if he were the one to have it cut from his throat. His fingers flutter on Nicky’s neck, numb, as if they’re someone else’s.

“I don’t think it had much to do with science. I think she was tired of what I had to say. I healed. Immediately. She didn’t do it again.”

“But if whatever they poisoned you with had worked …”

Nicky nods shortly. “Yes.”

His voice. Gone for good.

Joe hears the sob, harsh and broken, ring through the room, before he realises that he’s crying. Nicky gathers him against his chest, smooths his curls, presses kisses against his brow.

“It’s all right. I’m all right.”

“No, my beloved. You can’t say that this happened to you, and that it wasn’t the worst, and then that you’re all right. That makes no sense at all.”

They cling to each other. When Joe looks up, Nicky’s cheeks are wet too.

“You know the worst,” Nicky repeats, “it isn’t some secret. It was hearing you screaming. And knowing that you knew what it did to me, knowing how hard you were trying to keep quiet and that you couldn’t. It was trying to do the same for you and failing. It was not being able to touch you. It was when –”

He breaks off.

“When they opened that door,” says Joe.

“Yes,” Nicky breathes. “That was the worst.”

They’re silent for a while.

They had been so sure they just had to hold on until Andy and Booker found them. They’d taken for granted that Booker was out there, at Andy’s side, trying to _help_ them.

And then they’d come. But not as rescuers.

Finally Joe says it aloud: “How could he do it?”

Nicky shudders against him, and doesn’t speak. 

“He was our brother. I trusted him with my life, with _yours._ ”

And it’s not so much that any death could be the last. They assumed their years and days and seconds were as safe with Booker as his were with them. They never imagined he could see their freedom as currency to spend.

Joe feels stupid for that now.

“He can’t have known what it would be like.”

“No?” Joe starts up out of Nicky’s arms. “Then what did he expect? He thought after the bullets and the grenades and the gas they’d throw us a tea party? They were just waiting to get us tied down to bring out the cupcakes? It was _fifty hours._ He knew we weren’t free to leave. He knew what that meant to us. And he didn’t change his mind, he didn’t stop. He gave them Andy. If he didn’t know what they were doing to us – _if_ – it’s because he chose not to think about it. Because we didn’t matter to him enough. He didn’t care.”

Nicky closes his eyes and seems to sink deeper into the pillows, the way he’d sagged back on the gurney when they’d realised why Andy was bleeding. Only now, Joe registers the faintly pleading note there had been in Nicky’s voice. Almost, he wishes he hadn’t said any of it.

“You’re right,” Nicky says bleakly. “That’s true.”

He’s gone unpleasantly still again, lying there like a dead knight carved on a tomb.

“You’re still wondering what you could have done,” Joe says.

“There has to have been something.”

“Why?

“Because I’d rather think I missed the moment when the person I knew disappeared, than that he never existed.”

Neither possibility sits quite right with Joe, though for now he can’t think of a third.

“Did I have any hand in driving him to it, do you think, or was it just you?” he jibes, and regrets it at once. “I’m sorry, I’m not angry with _you._ ”

“I know.” Nicky’s eyes open at last. He says, very certain: “You’re sorry for him too.” 

Again, Joe sees Booker hunched in some gutter, and flinches away from the image even harder than before. “Don’t. Don’t try to make me forgive him.”

“I won’t. Why would I?” And at least, at last, the dead, burned-out look is fading. There’s something bright and sharp lighting up behind Nicky’s eyes. “I haven’t said I forgive him.”

“Well,” Joe asks. “Do you?”

Slowly, Nicky sits up.

“If I do,” he says, “I don’t think he’d like my concept of forgiveness. You think I’m not angry? Perhaps I’m not. _I don’t think there’s a word for what I am._ ”

Then he’s silent, for long enough that anyone else might think he had no more to say, but Joe knows more is coming;. He can feel Nicky considering it.

“I don’t hate him,” Nicky says slowly, at last. “I don’t want to hurt him. He’s suffering as much as I could want, and it only makes it worse. I hope …” he lets out a short, joyless laugh. “No, _hope_ doesn’t seem like the right word. But I wish he could have some kind of peace.” He deliberates again for the length of a breath. “And I don’t want to see him.” There’s one last silence, and he finishes, softly, “Ever.”

Joe drops back on the pillows beside him, silenced.

He does hate Booker. He doesn’t wish him an atom of peace. Maybe Joe doesn’t exactly want to hurt him, but he does want him to hurt.

_And yet …_

He hates it. The asterisk hovering alongside his sense of justice, the caveat in the background of every swell of anger. If Joe could, he’d rip it out of himself. It doesn’t seem worthy of some grandiose name like _compassion_ or _mercy,_ it’s not a choice. And for now, it makes him loathe Booker more, the sense that he will fail, in the end, to hate him enough. This betrayal should burn over Booker’s long existence like an beacon; it seems pathetic that one day Joe just won’t have the strength to keep it lit. One day he’ll be too tired, too sorry for them all, too _old._ One day Andy will die. And Booker doesn’t deserve to share in that grief, but it will hurt Joe too much face it without him.

Booker doesn’t deserve it. But Joe has spent a long time in his own company, enough to know that not even today will change the substance of him. He has loved Nicky for nine hundred years and more, and nothing else in him is limitless. They will outlive this, he and Booker. Even if neither of them wants to.

But he looks at Nicky and sees in his ice-green eyes a sadness more final and implacable than hatred could be.

“Then you won’t,” he promises. “You won’t, ever.” However much it hurt, he would leave the edges of what Booker shattered sharp and separate forever for Nicky’s sake.

His tone, that he says _you won’t_ rather than _we won’t_ must tell Nicky something. The cold seas in his gaze thaw a little, although there’s no warmth there for Booker, only for Joe. The corners of his lips twitch upwards.

“You see?” he murmurs. “You’re the kind one. I’m harder on him than you.”

“Why shouldn’t you be,” Joe demands. “Why should you want to see him again?”

The exhaustion wells up visibly in Nicky again, like a dye filtering through wet cloth. “It doesn’t matter what I want.”

Joe insists, “Of course it does.”

“Who knows what he’ll become if he’s left alone too long? He’d be dangerous. Maybe not only to us. No. Forever isn’t an option. Whatever I feel about it.”

Joe smarts at the unfairness of it. But Nicky’s eyelids are drooping half-closed, and there’s no more arguing to be done tonight. So he only pulls him closer, and Nicky tucks a knee between his legs, curls an arm around his back.

“Thank God for Nile,” Joe says, and doesn’t mean only for their rescue. Today wasn’t only an ending.

“She deserved better than all of this,” Nicky whispers.

“Tomorrow will be better,” Joe says. They'll make sure of that.

But there's no answer: Nicky’s asleep, finally, suddenly, his breath stroking Joe’s skin like a feather, his hair soft and clean against Joe’s cheek. He still smells faintly of nutmeg. There’s still a subtle gathering of tension between his brows.

Sleep laps at Joe too, gentle and insistent now as a tide, but he lingers for a moment.

There’s been a number, he realises, lurking somewhere in his mind – in a gutter, under an archway – some crevice behind the anger where he didn’t want to look.

Now, he looks down at Nicky and doubles it.

Then he doubles it again.

It still falls far short of forever. But it’s the best Joe can do.

THE END


End file.
